SoDA’s Use of Annotations

All SoDA information is stored in Word documents as annotations. Annotations are comments within a SoDA document. These do not affect the viewing or printing of the document. They are most commonly used for readers to review and comment on a document. SoDA uses annotations to

§  store the strings that hold the values of the SoDA commands

§  identify the beginning and ending points of SoDA commands

§  traverse quickly through a document to locate SoDA commands

Although you could use annotations to review SoDA documents, it is recommended that you make a copy of a SoDA document and place your comments in the copy.

Annotation Names

Word 2000 - Annotations are marked by a name and number enclosed in brackets, for example, [OPEN1] and [DISPLAY2]. The number is sequential in the document, from 1 to the total number of annotations. SoDA uses the annotation names to help identify commands.

Word 2002 – Annotations are identified by a comment marker, shown magnified here: image\ebx_-1479080306.gif. To see a non-functional representation of the annotation as Word 2000 displays it, click SoDA > Show/Hide Commands.

Note: To read about the annotation differences between the Word versions, see Word 2000 and Word 2002 Comparison.

 

Here are the names used by SoDA:

Annotation Name

Description

OPEN

An OPEN Command (a single command)

REPEAT

The start of a REPEAT command.

ENDREP

The end of a REPEAT command

DISPLAY

The start of a DISPLAY command

ENDDISP

The end of a DISPLAY command

LIMIT

The start of a LIMIT command.

ENDLIM

The end of a LIMIT command

LINK

The start of a link section

ENDLINK

The end of a link section

MASTER

The start of a master section

ENDMAST

The end of a master section

 

While most of these annotations are self explanatory, the last two pairs warrant further explanation. A link section is the text and graphics generated for one object retrieved by its parent REPEAT command. If the object is deleted from the source the location of the [LINK] and [ENDLINK] annotations defines the section that will be deleted from the document. The [LINK] annotation also contains the unique identifier for the corresponding object in the source, which assists in updating and Visit Source.

The [MASTER] and [ENDMAST] annotations are used internally by SoDA to identify which link sections are associated with a particular REPEAT command.

The Annotation Hierarchy

Although annotations are by nature sequential, SoDA uses the annotation names not only to identify the scope and values of each command, but to define a hierarchy as well.

You can view the hierarchy of SoDA commands using the Template View, which is displayed when you choose Template View from the SoDA menu.